The purpose of reading is to make an impact on the mind of the reader. This is true whether the text being read comprises a novel or a heads-up aircraft display. Material presented in a non-textual medium conveys information well suited to human absorption beyond the corresponding, one-dimensional text. Still pictures present object attributes such as colors, relative sizes, relative locations, patterns, groupings, and hierarchies. An object is viewed in a context. For example, a picture of a small object located with others in a corner conveys different information than the same object, enlarged, by itself, and in the center. Beginning sentences and paragraphs add contextual information by their location alone. Moving pictures have movement and temporal change as added attributes. Much information comes into the brain visually and through pattern recognition. Other information comes as audio information, conveying information through-tone, changing inflection, and changing volume level.
Computer presentation of text for human reading has failed to utilize much of the human brain. As a result, only a part of the possible bandwidth is utilized, and computer text presentation is often thought of as unfriendly, constant, mechanical, and generally lacking in some way. When given the choice, most people prefer to read a book in print rather than a book on a computer screen. Current computer text presentation is poor relative to a book, and even poorer relative to its potential.
Some work has been done in computerized text presentation. Huanng (U.S. Pat. No. 4,880,385) discloses an opto-mechanical speed reading device that allows viewing text printed on paper through a viewing window one line at a time, automatically advancing lines.
Advances have been made in methods for the computerized parsing of natural language into parts of speech. Schabes et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,475,588), disclose an improved parsing system for creating parse trees. Black, Jr. et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,331,556) disclose a method for storing parts of speech information in a file along with the original text for improved subsequent searching of the text. Okamoto et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,661,924), and Church (U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,405) disclose methods for disambiguating multiple-parts-of-speech. Zamora et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,212), van Vliembergen (U.S. Pat. No. 5,068,789), Hemphill et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 5,083,268) disclose methods for parsing natural language text. All of the above cited patents are herein incorporated by reference.
Reading is a complex process and there are many factors that determine differences in reading performance between readers and even for the same reader on different occasions. These include innate neurophysiological conditions such as dyslexia, but also age; behavioral and motivational factors; level of education and prior reading practice; and perceptual constraints. A reader may also have different reading objectives that will affect how he/she approaches the reading material. Despite all of the above, text is presented by computers, at worst, as one dimensional “beads on a string”, at best, similar to the two dimensional text presented by books. Indeed, whether text is presented in print or on an electronic display matters little because the text presentation is essentially identical.
Examples of the constant presentation of text are numerous. Topic sentences are presented the same as other sentences in a paragraph. Technical words are presented no different than non-technical words. Adjectives appear the same as nouns. Educationally difficult terms are presented the same as simple terms. The last paragraph in a chapter is presented the same as the first paragraph. Text is presented in left justified, broken lines of constant width requiring a jerking eye movement from far right to far left at regular intervals. Text is broken in mid-sentence, mid-phrase and mid-thought, applying ancient typesetting rules. Such text forces the eye to travel back and forth over large distances, mimicking a typewriter carriage. Text is advanced manually, broken into chunks determined by how many lines can fit on the screen.
There are several good reasons for not placing only one enhanced sentence per page in a book. These reasons may have been inappropriately carried over into the computer display of text. The possibility of modifying text presentation to enhance the reader's ability to read text by harnessing the power of digital manipulation appears to have been overlooked by those most knowledgeable in computing.
What would be desirable is a method for displaying the location of text with in relation to the text hierarchies within which the text resides. A method for displaying text on opposed pages which allows reading text without waiting for page changes would also be desirable. A text display system making use of the natural human ability and preference to move forward while viewing objects would be useful. A method for displaying text using quantitative color modification to transparently represent the cumulative relationships between larger sentence fragments and the words within would be desirable.
In order to preserve all of the information in an author-written text, text presentation, by definition, must systematically present the sequence of words written by the author in an unambiguous structure. It is also desirable that the additional information to be depicted in enhanced text presentation for improved reading would be incorporated into the requisite processes of text presentation itself, (i.e., placing characters against a contrasting background at various locations in space and time), rather than introducing additional symbols that require additional learning, reading and interpretation by the reader.